1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a magnetic head suspension, which supports a magnetic head for reading/writing data from/to a storage medium such as a hard disk drive.
2. Related Art
For a magnetic head suspension, improvements in the resonance characteristic and the shock resistance are desired.
That is, in order to move a magnetic head at a high speed in a seeking direction toward a target track in a storage medium such as a hard disk drive, it is required to increase the resonance frequency of the magnetic head suspension.
Further, in a case that a shock is applied when the magnetic head is located at a loading position (that is, when the magnetic head is in a floating state above the storage medium), in order to prevent the magnetic head from jumping in a Z direction (a direction orthogonal to a storage surface of the storage medium) and damaging the storage surface of the storage medium, it is required to improve the shock resistance.
However, improvements in the resonance characteristic and improvements in the shock resistance are contradictory, so there is no magnetic suspension in which both are improved in a good balance.
In other words, it is required to increase the rigidity of a magnetic head suspension in order to improve the resonance characteristic.
For example, there is a proposal to make a load beam portion have a lamination structure over or across the substantially whole area in a longitudinal direction so as to increase the rigidity of the load beam portion to thereby improve the resonance characteristic (see JP-A 10-31873 (1998), hereinafter referred to as a cited reference).
However, in the magnetic head suspension described in the cited reference, the mass of the load beam portion increases, whereby the shock resistance is deteriorated.